\.. 20 fi tted with all the latest gadgets, in- cluding a boiler downstairs to warm the water in cold weather. What it still lacked, said the pastor, was a suitable fancy background, and he had come to see me for advice and help on that point. Would it be possible to have a scene pain ted showing some of the principal events of sacred history? If so, who would be a good man to paint it r I thought at once of my sideshow-front friend, and in a little while I found him in a barrel house and persuaded him to see the pastor. The result was prob- ably the most impressive work of ecclesiastic art ever seen on this or any other earth. On a can- "" vas fifteen feet high and nearly forty feet long, the artist shot the works, fróm the Creation as described in Genesis I to the revolting events set forth in Revelation XIII. Noah was there with his ark, and so was Solomon in all his glory. No less than ten New Testament miracles were de- picted in detail, with the one at Cana naturally given the place of honor, and there were at least a dozen battles of one sort or another, including that between David and Goliath. The Tower of Babel was made so high that it oozed out of the top of the painting, and there were two separate views of Jerusalem. The sky showed a dozen rainbows and as many flashes of lightning, and from a very red sea in the foreground was thrust the maw of Jonah's whale, with Jonah himself shinning out of it to join Moses and the children of Israel on the beach. This masterpiece was com- pleted in ten days and brought $200 cash-the price of ten sideshow fronts. When it was hung in the new Baptist church, it wrecked all the other evan- gelical congregations of the lower At- lantic littoral, and people came from as far away as Cleveland, Tenn., and Gainesville, Ga., to wash out their sins in the tank and admire the art. The artist himself was invited to submit to the process but replIed that he was for- bidden in conscience, for he professed to be an infi del. T HE cops of those days, insofar as they were aware of artists at all, accepted them at their own valu- ation, and thus regarded them with considerable SUspICIon. If they were not actually on the leve] of waterfront crimps, dope peddlers, and piano-play- ers in houses of shame, they at least belonged somewhere south of sporty doctors, professional bondsmen, and handbooks. This attitude once cost an artist of my acquaintance his liberty for three weeks, though he was in- nocen t of any misde- meanor. On a cold win- ter night he and his girl made a roaring wood fire in the fireplace of his fourth-floor studio and settled down to lis- ten to a phonograph, then a novelty in the world. The glare of the blaze, shining red through the cobwebbed windows, led a passing cop to assume that the house was afire, and he turned in an alarm. When the firemen came roaring up, only to dis- cover that the fire was in a fireplace, the cop covered his chagrin by collaring the artist and charging him with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. There was no truth in this whatever, for the l dy was at least twenty-five years old and had come from a reformatory, but the captain at the station house, hearing that the cul- prit was an artist, ordered him held for investigation, and he was in the cooler three weeks before his girl managed to round up a committee of social-mind- ed saloonkeepers to demand his release. The cops finally let him go with a warn- ing, and for the rest of that winter no artist in Baltimore dared to make a fire. $ B UT it was not only artists them- selves who suffered from the harsh uncharitableness of the world; they also conveyed their ill luck to their non- professional intimates. I never knew an artist's girl to marry anyone above a jail guard or third-string jockey, and all the early photoengravers came to bad ends, usually violent. But the most un- fortunate camp follower of art that I ever encountered was a German sa- loonkeeper named Kuno Something-or- Other, who had a great many news- papermen among his customers. A couple of artists were in the lot, and when he opened a new saloon in 1900 they offered to decorate its bare walls for the drinks, with an occasional bite to eat. Kuno jumped at the chance, and the first two of what was to be a long series of volunteers moved in on him. The pair daubed away for four or five hours a day, and it seemed to Kuno to be an excellent trade, for the artists attract- ed many aesthetes, who patronized the bar while they watched them. But at the end of a week, casting up accounts with his bartender, Kuno found that he was really breaking less than even, for while the credit side showed eight or ten square feet of wall embellished with beautiful girls in flimsy underwear, the debit side ran to twenty-seven meals and three hun- dred and fifty beers, all consumed by the artists. Worse, the fellows' heirs and assigns were even hungrier and thirstier, and by the time one wall of the saloon was finished, Kuno was in the red for more than five hundred meals and nearly seven thousand beers, not to mention inn umerable whiskeys and a couple of barrels of paint. The easy way out would have been to call a halt, but he loved beauty too much for that. In- stead, he spent his days watching the work in progress and his nights trying to figure out how much he would be set back by the time it was finished. In the end these mathematical exercises unbalanced his mind, and he prepared to destroy himself, leaving his saloon half done, like a woman with one cheek made up and the other washed. His exitus set an all-time high for elaborateness. He came from Frank- furt-an-der-Oder and was a Prussian for thoroughness. Going down to the Long Bridge, which spanned the Pa- tapsco below Baltimore, he climbed on the rail, fastened a long rope to it, looped the other end around his neck, swal- lowed a dose of poison, shot himself through the head, and leaped in to the river. The old-time cops of Baltimore still astound rookies with his saga. He remains the most protean performer they have ever attended. -H. L. MENCKEN . Q.-How may slightly soiled playing cards be cleaned? A.-They are made by stringing pieces of meat, quarters of onions and two-inch pieces of bacon on sticks in alternate lay- ers and broiling them over coals. Either beef or lamb cut in one-inch cubes may be used. Veal kidneys, either alone or in com- bination with pieces of lean meat, add in- terest to kabobs. For well-done meat, al- low space between the pieces; for rare meat, pack them closely together.-Pitts- burgh Press. Any other questions?